God’s Fatherly care for the Just looks past our sins, and reaches even to our descendants
2 min • Digitized on December 23, 2021
From The Sinner’s Guide, page 133
By Venerable Louis of Granada
This protection not only delivers the just from evil and leads them to good, but turns to their profit the sins into which they are sometimes permitted to fall.
For after a fall they acquire greater prudence, greater humility, and love God more tenderly for pardoning their offences and delivering them from their evils.
Hence the Apostle tells us: “All things work together unto good to them that love God.” [Rom. viii. 28.]
And this protection God extends to the children of the just and to all their posterity, as He Himself assures us, saying: “I am the Lord thy God, mighty, jealous, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me; and showing mercy unto thousands to them that love Me and keep My commandments.” [Exod. xx. 5, 6.]
His words are verified in His treatment of the house of David, for whose sake He would not destroy his posterity, though they several times merited it by their crimes.
No less striking was His mercy to the children of Abraham, for whose sake He repeatedly pardoned them. He even promised that Ismael, Abraham’s son, though born of a bondwoman, should “increase and multiply exceedingly, and grow into a great nation.” [Gen. xvii. 20.]
He protected even the holy Patriarch’s servant, whom He guided in his journey and instructed in the means he should adopt to procure a wife for Isaac.
He is not only merciful to servants for the sake of a good master, but He even blesses wicked masters because of just servants, as wre see in the history of Joseph, whose master God visited with prosperity because of the virtuous youth who abode in his house.
Who, then, would not be devoted to so generous, so grateful a Master, Who watches so carefully over the interest of His servants?